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Small Island, by Andrea Levy

I saw the BBC mini series (2009) based on SmallIsland (2004) before I read the book. But I’m happy to report that even knowing what happens, I still found the book immensely appealing. Perhaps I’ve hit on a new definition of good literature: a book that gives pleasure even if you’ve already seen the film.

Andrea Levy was born in London after her parents migrated there from Jamaica in 1948, and she draws extensively on their experience. The book moves back and forwards in time and place from before World War II to 1948 in England and Jamaica. The story starts in 1948 with Hortense arriving in London to find Gilbert renting a room in a house belonging to Queenie Bligh. Hortense reveres England as the mother country and Gilbert has experienced it as a volunteer in the RAF during the war. But will it live up to their expectations? Queenie is letting rooms to make ends meet. She married Bernard to escape a life of drudgery on a farm, but although he returned to England after serving in the army, he hasn’t come home. Each main character tells how they arrived at this point in their lives, and what happens next.

One of the reasons the book holds my attention is that it offers a more complete picture than the film. That concentrated on Hortense and Queenie; the book gives space to Gilbert and, to a lesser extent, Bernard as well. Each character tells their story in the first person, and each character has a distinctive voice. This means that the reader gets to see the same situation from two or even three different perspectives, and can understand the feelings and responses of each participant. Hortense’s and Gilbert’s misunderstanding of each other are part funny, part heartrending. Hortense’s coldness to Queenie is equally painful. Bernard is the least appealing of the characters, but even he has moments where redemption seems possible. Creating this web of interactions with understanding and compassion, humour and pathos, is no mean feat, and Levy has managed it very effectively.

A second reason for finding it compelling reading is the inherent interest of the subject matter. Racism is a major theme; Levy is interested in exploring what it meant to be black and British in London immediately after the war. She shows the variations of prejudice, first in Jamaica, where light skin is more socially acceptable than dark skin, then in its brutal manifestations in England during the war, where Jamaicans were included in the colour bar imposed by the US Army on its black troops and finally in the ignorant bigotry of the post war British population at large. Queenie is a wonderful exception, though even she cannot ultimately escape the general intolerance. The lesson is that the West Indian community has to rely on itself.

I also found the siren call of the mother country to her colonial subjects fascinating, especially when contrasted with the indifference and even hostility of the British to those subjects. Gilbert, for example, realises that while his education in Jamaica was British centred – he can name all the canals in England – few in England even know Jamaica exists, let alone acknowledge the right of its black inhabitants to live in England. Even though the country has been shaken up by war – all the bits that had been blown up ‘settling in different places’ – there is almost no understanding that changes in the empire will have implications for people in Britain. I wondered if the picture of herself Levy has included in the book is intended to underline the legitimacy of West Indian aspirations to European culture; it shows a smiling black girl pointing her toe, dressed in a frilly white tutu.

SmallIsland was the winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004. Levy’s most recent book, The Long Song, was short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.